Listen to this episode here.
For this final episode of the Dice Exploder D&D miniseries, I wanted to go back to the source, to my first experiences playing the game. And I figured who better to do that with than someone else who was there, my first DM, my very own father.
We get plenty nostalgic for back when I was 8 years old, but I also made him talk to me about THAC0, early D&D's needlessly opaque and complicated version of an attack bonus. I made him do this because I think of THAC0 as so representative of how D&D's rules have worked for me over the years, and because my dad has never given a crap about any of those rules. When we played, he barely even read the rulebooks. So how did we still end up playing D&D? What were we even doing?
Further Reading
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition
Dice Exploder on Theorize from Brindlewood Bay, and the pros and cons of a fixed world vs one you’re making up together at the table.
E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and take it home for the holidays. My name is Sam Donald Wald. And for the conclusion of the dice, Exploder, Dungeons, and dragons mini series, I wanted to go all the way back to the source and bring on a very special cohost.
My first ever dungeon master. dad. This is perhaps obviously a very nostalgic episode. But in classic Dice Exploder form, I'm not here to just wax poetic about the good old days. I wanted to sit down and examine my earliest in some ways my purist experiences with Dungeons and dragons and see what we could learn from them. And I'm lucky to be able to talk with someone else who was there and who kept pretty meticulous notes about what we were getting up to.
the more than that I wanted to have on my dad, because when we were playing D and D To the best of my memory, he basically never fucking read the rule books. And yet we were still definitely unquestionably playing Dungeons and dragons. So we're back again to the question at the heart of this series for me, what the fuck is D and D like, what did it mean to play it when the DM didn't formerly even know how? And what makes D and D feel authentically D and D if it's demonstrably, not the rules. And to get into all that.
I asked my dad to come talk with me about a very silly needlessly complicated mechanic that he always loved to complain about. THAC0. To hit armor class zero, a number that basically just measured how good you are at hitting people back in. Advanced Dungeons and dragons second edition. At least that's what we were applying.
And I don't know how to describe this exactly, we get into it during the episode, but it feels to me like the vibes around phaco, the weirdness of that acronym, the opaqueness of how it worked. That still feels like an essential part of D and D to me, even for someone like my dad who never read the rules. I wanted to see where that conversation would take us.
So in this episode, we tell a lot of stories about back when I was eight years old. But we also get into what is DND, what makes a good mechanic and a bunch of design ideas from the broader world of design and computer science in particular. My dad is a professor of computer science.
It's a grand old time and a fitting end to this series. So let's get into it. Here is Jeff Ondich, my dad, with THAC0.
Sam: Hey dad, welcome to Dice Exploder.
Jeff: Thanks. I'm super excited to be here.
Sam: Yeah, not every day you get to go on your favorite podcast, right?
Jeff: right. Literally my second favorite podcast, honestly.
Sam: what's, what's number one?
Jeff: Risky Business, a fabulous security news podcast.
Sam: Great, I'm glad you're uh, giving me something to live up to. So you know, I opened this D& D series with a introduction to my history with D& D, and I thought it would be interesting to get that story from your perspective,
Jeff: Hello? Yeah.
Sam: and you know, maybe start with like your introduction to Dungeons Dragons.
Jeff: So I was in graduate school from 1983 to 1989. by 1983, people knew about D& D and when it showed up in ET that was a, a really big boost in its popularity, but, That was
Sam: I've never heard of E. T. Is That like Stranger Things?
Jeff: Yeah, you can't really pull that off. You're too old to pull off that
joke, man. Alright, so, moving on. I kind of wanted to play it, but I didn't have, my friends were not into that kind of thing, and, your mother definitely was not into that kind of thing, so when one of my grad school buddies, and I, I use that term loosely, but they wanted to play a game, and I said, oh yeah, I want to play a game too, so we played, I don't know, five, six sessions but they took all Saturday, and so I felt guilty about being away from mom on the weekend, and,
Anyway, a couple of things stand out to me. First of all, is my friend Chuck went for all the attack and damage bonuses he could get. He created a character that was a big old oaf called Ud, and I just loved that name.
But his approach was, you know, that's what he wanted to do, is he wanted to accumulate those statistics. And, for me, the thing that really I enjoyed most about that game was that our friend Dave had created this world, and it was a mystery, and I wanted to figure out the mystery.
And there was particularly a mystery about my character, which, honestly, I never figured out, because we just didn't play long enough, because I think we just didn't like each other well enough. So, anyway, that's how I got started. Then you go forward to 1998, and I did a little research on this. I think we bought you Quest 64 for your 8th birthday, so
that'd be June of 1998, and that's when it came out.
And you were playing it, and I had this memory that it was That it had RPG in the title, but it doesn't. But, thank you Google Image Search it had it on the back. It had the acronym RPG on the back, and you came to dinner and said, what does that stand for? And I said, you know, told you, and then said, but if you want a real role playing game.
Sam: Rewatch ET, kid.
Jeff: That's right. And so. Wow, your eyes got big, and you said, oh, can we play
Sam: Yeah,
Jeff: the answer was yes, but you need to give me a couple weeks. And anyway, we got together a few of your friends and started in October of 1998,
and I,
Sam: this is funny because I remember Quest 64 extremely well, like I played a lot of that game, and think of it now, and I even at the time, as like, not a very good game.
Jeff: yeah, that's my recollection,
Sam: it was kind of a bullshit bad RPG, and it still managed to capture my attention, and I remember also the polygons of that generic fantasy protagonist's face on the front really did not have the artistry of Ocarina of Time or Mario 64, the other games I was playing, or even the like fun cartooniness of Diddy Kong Racing, right? Like, it was Pretty generic and garbage and still I needed more of that and that brings us to Dungeons and Dragons, right?
Like, let's, let's talk about that. So, What do you remember about our first couple sessions of play? And, like, I remember character creation also being, like, a whole thing.
Jeff: Yeah, I don't remember when we did the character creation. I have detailed notes from the first three or four sessions
It's interesting that the stuff that I've really retained is Sort of the legendary stories we have. So one
of the legendary stories you mentioned on the different episode where I tell y'all you're waking up in an inn and I give, gave you a little backstory and then Joey gets up and starts looking under the bed and checking the toilet for monsters.
Right. And I've always thought of that as. You were playing CD ROM games at the time, and a lot of those CD ROM games were just about clicking on everything and seeing what's there.
And so that was a thing. So I remember that legend, and I remember saying, you know, that first session, Joey decides he's gonna fight me, right from the very beginning, you know, and he's gonna run into the forest, and I just keep throwing bats at him, and it's,
you know, you're gonna die if you keep doing this, so.
Sam: Stay on the rails, kid! Come on!
Jeff: Exactly. But at the same time, you know, it's an eight year old who I did want to, I did want to give the rest of it. And of course, You were going nuts during that first episode. You were so upset that they weren't taking it seriously.
And so,
Sam: I wanted to be on the rails!
yeah,
Jeff: or at least just get a sense of what the beginning of the rails looked like, right?
And I didn't know what I was doing, but you were also eight, and so that was, that was interesting, you know?
I mean, I can talk at length about this, we can fill all our time with it, but,
um, but one of the, a couple of things I would say about this is one, it was so much fun. I had such a blast playing with you guys.
Two, I have a ton of notes about the kinds of meta conversations I had to have with the individuals in this group, say. You know, here are some things that you might want to think about when you're playing this game to make this more fun for everybody. You know, Joey and I, you know, I love Joey, and he and I were able to work some things out, so that was great.
Also, I remember that you got so squirrely that I made you run around the house a few times. Go outside and do a few laps!
Sam: Just invoking rule zero right out of the gate, before the story can continue you must run a lap around the house in real life.
Jeff: Exactly, exactly.
So anyway, it was a blast, but it was also, I'm dealing with these little kids that don't know anything, that don't have much backstory, and I was able to throw every bullshit trope from fantasy and sci fi at you at my leisure. So
you know, we made a hollow world and a, and a generation ship with elves on it, you know, whatever.
Sam: So while we are running around the house doing laps and running into the woods like hooligans to see if we the skybox at the end of the video game level, We're also like, looking at these sheets full of weird little numbers, and while we're learning our basic addition and multiplication tables at school, right?
And, One of those weird little numbers was Thaco, and So, I'll say up front, I did not go back and actually read the rulebook for how Thaco works, because that's not the conversation that I cared about having here, and I'm curious if you remember how Thaco worked yourself and can even describe it.
Jeff: Why, yes. In fact, I have a Reddit page right here that explained it to me.
Sam: Had to go to Reddit for it, though.
Jeff: Yeah. Okay, so, fayco goes like this. You have some sort of inherent attribute which says how likely you are to make a hit if you swing your sword or your mace or shoot your arrow.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: that inherent thing is called Thaco, to hit on armor class zero. I am going after an orc that has armor class five, and I have this inherent 18 Thaco.
Then I'm gonna take that 18, I'm gonna subtract 5, 13, and that's how high I have to roll to hit the orc with my axe. Fine.
That's Thaco. So you've got a thing that represents your hitting ability, right, and then you have another thing that is the opponent's armor class and you're subtracting and then that's how high do I have to roll to do the thing.
Now I was cutting this short all the time with you guys. I was just saying, you know, you say what do I need to roll? And I say, okay this number So I was not
Sam: know that.
Jeff: I was
Sam: just assumed you were good at math, and like, doing the math.
Jeff: Yeah, but here's the problem with Thaco is that You've got all of these things where larger numbers gives you more of a thing, right? You've
got,
a larger level number means you are more experienced. You have a more experience gives you, you know, let's, again. And the only thing that has the reverse parity where smaller is better is armor class.
And, and it just means that everybody has to pause and think every single time. Oh yeah, this thing goes the other way. I have to do a subtraction and the cognitive, the mental model of this thing just doesn't, just doesn't fly.
I mean, you know, I, I was writing down what would I design instead, and I'm sure that if I read what volume three or five or whatever, wherever they did this, is that if instead what I have is resistance to being hit
harm, harm resistance, let's do that. Harm resistance is a number, and the bigger it is, the more resistant you are to harm.
And then you have armor class that increases your harm resistance.
And, you know, you got to roll above the sum of those two things to hit the thing.
Sam: Yeah. Well, I also want to compare it to, there's a whole slice of Elf games like End of the Odd and Cairn that are using a roll under system, where when you want to do a strength thing, instead of adding a bonus derived from your strength score to the number and trying to figure it out, you just succeed if you roll under your strength. And so, a higher strength is good, but you want to roll low.
And, this mechanic keeps a little bit of that dissonance, like my friend David Block hates this because he wants to roll a high number. He just wants the number on the die to be high and that's good. And that makes total sense.
But the mechanic at least is still really intuitive. Like, it doesn't have the problem of Thaco, because it's very clear, like, I want my strength to be high, and then I just compare that number to the number that I rolled. There's no math involved, it's just a simple comparison.
Jeff: Yep. It is.
Sam: Faeco is.
like the worst of all of that.
Jeff: Yeah, agreed.
Sam: So, you were just ignoring this shit and making numbers up though.
Jeff: Sometimes. I mean, you know, I did some computations ahead of time and I, I, I tried to know what your THACOs were, all of you guys, but most of the time, what I really wanted is I just want the story to keep going. And I got to a point and I'd say, okay, I'd know your relative ones, right? So if, if you're all trying to hit the same thing, it would be very important for the illusion.
Sam: Yes.
Jeff: For for, like, Ragnar was tougher, right? And so he should be able to hit slightly more easily. And I, I would need to make sure I knew the difference between your levels.
Sam: Yes.
Jeff: But then, I'd just say, okay, how much do I want them to probably do this? And that would, then I would make up that number.
Sam: Yeah. So do You feel like you've gotten out why it sucks, or do you want
to,
Jeff: yeah, it's about, it's about, Cognitive load.
This is what it is. And so this, I just want to, I'm going to kick off. I'm going to stick in here one of the things that has really struck me. So I've been, of course, I listened to your podcast when it first came out. But you've had what? 25 episodes, something like that.
Sam: more than 30 now,
Jeff: Yeah, I have listened to all of them, and I've been really puzzling about why. Because I love you, and I care about everything you make but I don't play these games. Except with you, I am unlikely to be playing these games. And so, why am I listening to this? And the answer that I have come to is that the kinds of things that you and your guests are talking about are the same kind of design considerations I think about when I'm making and teaching the making of software.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: And here, this notion of cognitive load is something I talk to my students all the time about, because you're trying to reduce the cognitive load on your users so they can interact with the actual content of the thing.
In this case, you know, we're not talking about making software, but the content of the thing is the story that we are telling together, and, in a piece of software, the content of the thing is, it's the numbers in the spreadsheet, it's the, the database that you're managing, whatever it is, you wanna make the interface disappear as much as possible so that people can feel like they're actually just touching the stuff.
And so the cognitive load, we're trying to reduce that for the users, but you're also trying to reduce that for the other people who have to maintain your code.
And so you've got these multiple audiences and lots of trade offs. And I think that these are the same kinds of things that you're talking about a lot on this show.
And the other thing that was really fundamental that I care about is what are the goals of the users of my software? It is so easy to lose sight of that. And I have, I got to tell you, I've listened to your episode with Ema Acosta three times because you are getting at some central thing about what experience are we trying to have together? What is the watch trying to drive these people who are telling this story together and following the structure of this particular game. You know, what are their goals for doing this at all? and I think about that a lot.
And so reducing cognitive load so you can focus on the thing and also keeping track of these user goals is hard. But it's really key to good design.
Sam: Yeah. That's really interesting. I'm gonna bring us back to Thaco. a couple of things I wanna throw out there.
The first is, why does Thaco exist in the first place? And, I think Thaco is really coming from this, like, wargaming tradition, it's coming from this stupid amount of little fiddly math that is both inherent in the chainmail style games that D& D is evolving from and in Gary Gygax's personal sensibilities. And that's how we end up with it, and a lot of that is what makes it bad
but I also think that it is really notable that I have a very, very strong memory of Thaco and what its deal is And being like kind of pleased by it, even if I was a little frustrated by it, something about it felt special. And I do think that the arcaneness of it contributes to the arcane specialness of Dungeons and Dragons and part of what makes D& D such a sticky and provocative game to an eight year old's mind who has all the time in the world just try to learn how the magics therein work and function.
Jeff: Yeah, I think that just the, I mean, you as a really little guy talked about loving patterns,
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: them. So you were interested in structure very early. You wanted to learn bridge when you were four so the idea that there would be these mechanisms that had structure, and you could learn that, and then see if you could exert some control over those mechanisms, of course it was attractive to you.
Sam: Well, and it wasn't just exert any control, it was creating the thing that I perhaps loved most, which was stories, right?
Jeff: totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: set of magical structures for generating these amazing things that I wanted to spend all my time doing.
Jeff: So, can I hit a slightly different tangent that comes close to this? So, I've been thinking about the difference between games with GMs and games without.
Sam: Mm.
Jeff: There are many games of each kind, right? But one of the attractions of having a GM based game is that, as a player, I felt like there exists this objective world.
I don't know what it is, and I'm gonna go find out. And I feel like you, as a 8 year old player of the game, were definitely on board with that. You want to go explore this structure that somebody has brought into existence. And so I've got this quote from my notes in that first session. Okay. So, your character was named Finn. He was a rogue. We were in this place with three paths. One went down, one went across, one went up. And I wrote down in my notes here, Sam couldn't wait to see the Downward Passage, so Finn just took off back down the hall.
And so, Joey wanted to acquire cool things early on. He really was pissed at me that first session that the armorer in town wasn't open. and boy did he get neat stuff over time. Do you remember the ow knife?
Sam: Oh, I, I, yes, I still tell the story of the ow Knife,
Jeff: Oh, then do so.
Sam: So, this was years later, we are wandering through a essentially post apocalyptic continent that has suffered a climate calamity, and Joey is trying to forge a sword using a like a brick oven he has put on a wagon out of raw materials he's found on the side of the road , and this is I think anyone would say not ideal circumstances for forging a sword, yet he was insistent, and so finally you were like, sure, fine, whatever, give me a roll to see how well you forge this sword.
And he rolled as I recall, okay. And so, the blade that he was able to put together and bestow magic upon it was sort of a butter knife and whenever you used it to cut anything, it would go, OW! And we all lost our minds and then carried that knife around for the rest of the campaign.
Jeff: Yep. Yep. Right. So, I mean, that was the kind of player that Joey was. And you were, were, let's go see. let's let's figure out what the mystery is here.
Sam: yeah. And of course Matt was around just wanting to get into fights and beat up orcs, kill stuff. He was playing Diablo at home and he wanted to come and play Diablo at this table where you could be a little more interactive about it.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Yeah, and I
tried to, to honor that now and then, you know, give him something big to beat up. So, yep,
Sam: And part of the magic of D& D is that it, as a game, could accommodate all those people.
Jeff: it could, yeah.
Sam: So, the other thing I think really strongly about when I think about Thaco and playing with you was we've touched on this already, but you were just making up the friggin number. Like, you didn't care how any of these rules worked.
Like, it mattered that Finn was a rogue because you wanted to be able to let me go do cool rogue stuff. But, you did you read the books ever?
Jeff: I mean, yes, but not all the way through. I read bits and pieces. I went looking for cool monsters in the monster manual.
I cared about getting you guys up to speed on sort of the basics of combat.
but I did not care about the arcana of combat or much of anything else. And reading, again, reading my notes, I think that first session, first couple of sessions, I, I had spots where I had to go back and sort of fix some things because I said, Oh, I made, I made these guys way too easy to kill cause I didn't give them all three actions that they were supposed to get each round. You know, I kind of didn't care, because you guys really enjoyed those battles, but
So, yeah, I'd read a little but over time I read them less and less, because I just had my style.
Sam: Yeah, and I think of, I ran a lot of D& D 5e for a long time, and I never learned what any of the class abilities did. I would just, when someone told me they were using an ability, look at it and be like, Oh, yeah, cool. I guess you do that thing. Great. And, it felt like you were doing that all the time for most of the rules of the game.
Jeff: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I'd occasionally read lists of spells and read lists of of, what were those things? Skills, I guess? Is that right? That
came in in third edition? I'm just validating your
Sam: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jeff: but what I was looking for there was not oh, give me a rigid structure in which to enforce things. You know, I was looking for creative ideas of cool stuff that the characters could maybe learn how to do. And you know, you talk about Joey's forging a sword, I thought it was really cool that, a player would want to have their character do that kind of work to learn a skill. That was cool.
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Jeff: I was talking to your sister earlier today, and one of the questions I asked her was what made it fun? I also asked her what makes it fun now, because, you know, she has her roughly weekly game that her husband runs.
But, she said this, about what made it fun, is that there was something about there being an authority or an officialness. about the game as opposed to just playing pretend with your
Sam: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Jeff: And the officialness, she said it was so cool that you could turn into an animal, even though we always played horses or dogs or whatever.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: And that's kind of a magic of just having a rule structure or just having an external authority. It magically transform a thing that you would do in your room with your dolls anyway.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: Another thing that I'm thinking about is this notion of user goals. So, you know, we, we agree that the fundamental goal is we're going to be telling the story together.
But, so there's this guy, he was the inventor of Visual Basic. His name is Alan Cooper, and he has written this user experience book that was one of the earliest user interface design textbooks, and he talks right at the beginning of the book about about the importance of user goal centered design.
Sam: Mm hmm.
Jeff: One of the things he talks about is how getting clarity on what user goals are is not so easy. And so, that you might think as a designer is the important thing, is that you want to efficiently process invoices. And he says, yeah, that's not the worker's goal. The user's goal is to not look stupid at work. The user's goal is to maybe make their boss happy. The goal isn't efficient processing of invoices, right?
And I feel like there's some of this here, too. Yes, we agree that this fundamental goal of we're going to tell a story together, but why are we going to tell a story together? And are there some other things, you know? So this notion of Joey wanting to be able to create cool, weird stuff, that's another kind of goal that, I don't know, a good management of a game probably needs to take into account.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: and in fact, by ignoring most of the rules of D& D, but keeping some of that structure, I was able to do that.
Sam: Yeah. What do you think our goals were as eight year olds, and what were your goals?
Jeff: Yeah. It's hard to say. I mean, 8 year olds are, everything is new. And, 8 year olds are smart as hell, right? And you were pretty smart kids.
And so, going and exploring some new thing yeah, I mean, I don't know, some new way to have fun. and,
Sam: mean exploring in the real world feels like the goal as much as it was the goal in the fiction, too.
Jeff: yeah, for sure, for sure.
Sam: Sort of exploring the, confines of the social interaction we had constructed here. Like what, what does it mean to be a person who is a player of one of these games?
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, so, my goals, I, you know, I didn't get my life priorities right all the time. I still don't. But the one thing I really, really wanted was for that very short window of having small children in my home, in my life, I wanted to be with them, do cool things, have fun together. I wanted to come out the other end into my fifties and say, that went pretty well.
Sam: seems like D& D helped with that.
Jeff: It did! It totally did! I mean, you're both playing D you're both playing games. All the time. And that's fun. I love that.
Sam: Yeah, and we also you know, to speak for Elena a little bit, we both love you very much too, and really appreciate those times and those memories, so.
Jeff: Yeah, I got a um, Elena forwarded to me a text stream from one of her other friends who, didn't remember much detail.
Sam: Yeah,
Jeff: But did remember that it was just exciting to be at the table. And I love that. That that's what this 30 year old remembers.
Sam: yeah.
So, to me, the, like, big question of this D& D series that I have been trying to steer us towards today is, like, what the fuck is Dungeons Dragons?
Like, there's five editions of this game. The game is always changing. Every table is really different. I know people who play D& D just because they wanna beat up a bunch of orcs and I know people who want to do fantasy political machinations and I know D& D players who just want to show up and hang out with their friends.
And D and D is trying to be something for all of those people. And a lot of those things are referenced in its core rule books, but I was really interested in talking with you because you did so little reading of those rule books and still found something that feels inarguably Dungeons and Dragons. And, I'm curious to hear you talk about, like, what is that thing? Like, what are the parts of D& D that really feel load bearing to you?
Jeff: Yeah, I was trying to answer this question in my thinking ahead of time. It doesn't have to be D& D, so there's lots and lots of other games, and lots of the attributes that I'm going to talk about are shared with other games, right?
I think that some of the fundamentals here , having a GM led game, someone who builds the fra at least the framework of the world, and puts in some plot elements to get things started, does make the player's experience feel like we are gonna go interact with a thing that is real. And I think that's powerful.
Second thing is long campaigns. Long term commitment to a character, a set of characters, their relationships, their relationship with the world. That is attractive in a certain kind of gaming.
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: So I would say those two things are essential, but there's also, so many books, all those pictures, all those drawings.
And one thing I gotta say, you know, when you first told me about what was it, Fate dice? Is that right? We're doing D6 and we're counting the number of dice, depending on the context. And, you know, you're dropping some or whatever, all made total logical sense. And it made me sad. Because these non standard dice, which are of course now are very standard, but these, these platonic solids plus the d10 I don't know. I love them. Lots of people love them. I'm looking at, at the ones you bought me right here, 'cause you, you made, you had to buy them because you were sick of me wishing I had them . So
Yeah, anyway, II don't think there's s that much load bearing. I think it's a particular, it's a campaign based game, long term commitment, uh, is built by a game master, and there's some great art that goes with it.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, that feels right to me.
The, piece of that that I had not thought of before was the sheer number of books and pages in those books, it's another thing that adds to the authority, both of the Dungeon Master and of the game itself, as being and feeling official, and that plays into both, oh, this is a real game, whereas like, a 12 page thing you find on itch maybe isn't real because it's not 1, 200 pages.
But it also, it also plays into that feeling you've talked about a couple of times here of, showing up as a player to a game with a game master makes it feel like there is a coherent, central authority for the fiction that we can engage with, and that is really satisfying to a certain kind of person.
But the, the art Being a big pillar also feels super important to me. I while you were pausing there thinking, I was going to ask, did the dice feel important? I've thought about that a lot, the sort of weirdness of D& D feels important to D& D, and I had forgotten how much like the, in some ways it doesn't matter what the art is, it just matters that there is a bunch of art.
Like, the first edition D& D, second edition, third edition, fourth, fifth, all have very distinct but very internally consistent swaths of art to make you feel like that's the world that you're going into. And that's really helpful for D& D, isn't
Jeff: Yeah, Yeah, I think so. I mean, and I got to say, I, I would often pick a monster to include and, you know, the monsters I included sometimes were friendly, right? It turns out, you know, but sometimes I'd pick them just cause I thought, oh, that's a cool picture. I like that one. Let's put one of those in the world.
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Okay, and also, the commitment to campaign play, to me feels important to D& D because it kind of represents a commitment as a group to hanging out together. That one of the things that a board game night is good for is this commitment that like this group of people like each other and are going to socialize once a month when we come over and play board games at Sam's house. But D& D, because it is a serialized story, also expects of you, includes in it the expectation that You're gonna do your best to show up every time, because it'll be worse if you don't.
And that feels like a drawback of the game. Like the game is, I think it has been designed to try to capture people into it like that, so that they have a hard time leaving the hobby and are gonna keep spending money on D& D.
But I also think that there's a positive side to that, of by committing to playing this game together, we are committing to the idea that like, we love each other and find each other important and are going to set aside a couple hours out of our week every week to get together and that That's a big part of the magic of D& D to me.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.
Sam: And, okay, bringing Thaco back into those pillars,
I feel like it is a really good example of what those 1200 pages of manuals represent. That There are all kinds of weird little arcane nooks and crannies for you as a player to explore and master and thereby have control over this story and to make this story feel official. Both to like legitimize the world of the game, but also to make the world feel strange and pointy in the way that the weird dice do.
And accumulation, like layers of paint of all the little Thacos in the game feel like one of the pillars that you have described.
Jeff: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I, I think of Teiko, two things come to mind about, about it, this history that,
Sam: Yeah.
Jeff: One is you talked about the war gaming as a, precursor to what Gygax did. I think those, a lot of those same people played Stratomatic Baseball,
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Jeff: right? So Stratomatic Baseball is every year the statistics from the previous year would be published on this set of game cards for each player, and so you would know what Rod Carew's batting average and on base percentage and, homeruns and all that stuff were the previous year.
And so you could replay games. Using these real players and rolling dice, you could replay entire seasons, and if you had nothing to do because you were a nine year old in your bedroom
Sam: importantly, I think 1970 or
Jeff: Yeah, exactly,
right. right, right, right. Then, yeah, you could play all seasons over again and see if the Yankees won again.
Sam: yeah,
Jeff: And so I think that that just fiddling with the numbers, you know, playing with, I've been doing fantasy baseball for, 35 years now? And fucking with the numbers is, you know, part of the enjoyment for a certain kind of person. So I think Thaco just came right out of that.
But the other thing about Thaco: it looks to me as a, I've been a software manager, I've been a teacher of software design, I've been a coder myself, and Thaco looks like that coding idea that you had, it was the first idea you had to solve the problem, you wrote it down, you moved on to the next thing, and you never thought about I wonder if there's a better way to do this?
Sam: yeah, totally. But then it has a cool name like Thaco. Like,
Jeff: I know! With a zero in
Sam: I don't give a shit about base attack bonus but like, I'm doing a whole episode of my stupid podcast about Thaco. Like,
Jeff: Right.
Right.
Sam: I don't know, I feel like that conversation about pillars of what make D& D, D& D there's some sort of conclusion to come to in there, at least for this episode, but I still don't know exactly what it is,
But I, I also, I don't know, it's not like this series is gonna, like, tie off the discussion on D& D either, I, feel like, I, through making this series, have answered a lot of questions I didn't even know I had about D& D, and that's awesome.
But it has left a lot of things open too, and that's, I don't know, that's also what D& D is about, so. Do you have final thoughts on Thaco or Dungeons and Dragons at large? And
Jeff: On Thaco, uh, don't let the
door hit ya on the
d in general, I think it is a structure that is sufficient for a large number of people to do the kind of thing that they want to do in this kind of game. And the fact that it is not necessarily optimal, and there are lots of ways in which it might not be optimal, still that sufficiency is a large part of the reason it sticks, you know? I don't need the best way to do a thing, I just a way to do the thing.
Sam: And this was the first and most popular.
Jeff: Exactly.
Sam: Well dad, thanks for being on Dice Exploder.
Jeff: It's been a blast, and keep making them! I mean, okay,
I know you've got a scriptwriting career.
gotta stop.
Sam: Thanks again to Jeff for being here. You can take computer science courses from my dad if you are enrolled at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. As always you can find me on socials at S. Donald or on the dice explode or discord? Our logo was designed by spore agree. Sorry. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray and our ad music is Lily pads by my boy, Travis Tesmer.
And thanks to you as always for listening to this whole. Friggin D and D mini-series it's over. Thank God. Let's do something else. I'll see you next week